Anything but a monopoly is a step http://zacherypure.iloveblog.com/ down. Maybe they’ll be the top result for some lyrical searches, maybe they won’tthere’s a lot of established competition. All of this ignores the Rap Genius plan to be the top result for everything, from De La Soul to the Old Testament to the Pentagon Papers. Moz CEO Rand Fishkin predicts “they’ll bounce back in the next few weeks or months, but not entirely.” Suddenly, the company’s bluster -brag that “in a year from now [we] will be the biggest site in the whole Internet” needs some rethinking. Rap Genius will never be safe on the internet again, because as united states far as they’re concerned, Google is the internet. The search engine functions like public infrastructure, a road that takes anyone who wants to look up lyrics to the internet lyrics store, but it thinks like any Walmart of Exxon. It has its own secret rules, its own private penalties, and its own willingness to harm any company that dares make it look stupid. The Rap Genius co-creators must have known what they were getting themselves into: an inordinately complex game of Mouse Trap with the devil that’s finally snapped back. That’s grand as long as Google is blasting you with traffic, but cross them, and they can flick a switch and blink you out of existence.
Full story: http://valleywag.gawker.com/is-rap-genius-fucked-1489917137
Rachel Lucas 